Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the
Science of Psychology
The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold
Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring re-
cords of accomplishment in four areas of psychology: the
application of psychology, the practice of psychology, psy-
chology in the public interest, and the science of psychol-
ogy. The 2012 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life
Achievement in the Science of Psychology is Philip G.
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Zimbardo.
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Dorothy W. Cantor, president of the APF, will present
the APF Gold Medal Awards at the 120th Annual Conven-
tion of the American Psychological Association on August
3, 2012, at 4:00 p.m. Members of the 2012 APF Board of
Trustees are Dorothy W. Cantor, president; Charles L.
Brewer, vice president/secretary; Gerald Koocher, trea-
surer; Elisabeth R. Straus, executive vice president/execu-
tive director; Norman Anderson; Brian N. Baird; David H.
Barlow; Camilla Benbow; Sharon Stephens Brehm; Connie
Chan; William Howell; Anthony Jackson; Ronald F. Levant;
Aurelio Prifitera; Sandra Shullman; Archie L. Turner; and
Kurt Geisinger, APA Board of Directors liaison.
Philip G. Zimbardo
Citation
This award honors the distinguished career and ground-
breaking contributions that Philip G. Zimbardo has made to
the advancement of psychological science. His classic
study on the psychology of imprisonment, the Stanford
Prison Experiment, stands as one of psychologys most
famous demonstrations that situational factors can power-
fully shape human behavior. In addition, his pioneering
studies on shyness, deindividuation, time perspective, and
heroism have helped establish important new areas of in-
vestigation on topics of great social and humanitarian con-
cern, and his bestselling text and trade books and Discov-
ering Psychology video series have brought psychological
science to millions of people around the world. In recog-
nition of these extraordinary accomplishments, the Amer-
ican Psychological Foundation is pleased to recognize
Philip G. Zimbardo with its Gold Medal Award for Life
Achievement in the Science of Psychology.
Biography
Nature dealt Philip G. Zimbardo a tough hand; Nurture
worsened it. A skinny, sickly kid who grew up in the
Depression era of the 1930s, in the ghetto of New Yorks
South Bronx, with undereducated parents of Sicilian heri-
tage, in poverty, and on welfare, he managed to do good in
America, and for psychology.
356
His most formative early experience was being quar-
antined for five months, starting at the age of five in 1938,
for whooping cough compounded by double pneumonia.
Along with many other poor kids, he was housed in a
hospital for children with every known contagious disease,
at a time without magic meds such as penicillin. While
children died daily in the game of genetic roulette, Zim-
bardo resolved not to die, but to survive with daily prayers
to be smart, strong, brave, and healthy. He made a mental
heaven of that earthly hell in which parental visits were
limited to one hour on Sundays and in which there were no
phones, no mail, no music, no games, no human contact,
and no touch ever. He honed his ingratiation skills by
complimenting the surgically masked nurses, he developed
leadership skills by inventing group games for kids in
nearby beds, and he learned to read and write from
H.E.R.O. comic books. The experience was the wellspring
of his later interests in shyness, prisons, anonymity and
deindividuation, and heroism. And of course, it fueled an
eternal optimism, resilience, and need to help others in
need.
Discriminated against by local toughs for looking
Jewish, he learned to run fast, eventually becoming captain
of the varsity track team at Brooklyn College. Ignored for
the last place on the 151st Street stickball team, he prac-
ticed hitting the Spaldeen in the schoolyard until he became
a two-sewer distance hitter. Realizing he was destined to be
a scrawny follower, Zimbardo first bulked up by going
camping every weekend and carrying a huge backpack on
long hikes with a friend. Then, after observing what made
some kids become leaders, he chose that life path, eventu-
ally becoming the captain of all the sports teams he played
on, the president of everything from his college fraternity
to the American Psychological Association and the West-
ern Psychological Association, and for good measure, the
chair of all the presidents in the Council of Scientific
Society Presidents.
Zimbardos making it out of poverty can clearly be
traced to two sources: becoming educated and developing
a future-oriented time perspective. He loved school, read-
ing, writing, and his teachers, who created alternate realties
for him in which to excel. But even as a child, he realized
that to succeed required planning, setting goals, and mak-
ing decisions based on best estimates of outcomes and of
costs versus gains. In contrast to the totally present-fo-
cused, hedonistic lifestyle of his father and relatives, which
doomed them to live a what is kind of life, he chose a
what could be better if I do this and not that now kind of
life. Research into this neglected domain of human think-
ing and action eventually surfaced as a major research
interest for Zimbardo.
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Vol. 67, No. 5, 356 358 DOI: 10.1037/a0028703

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Philip G.
Zimbardo
During the year his family lived in North Hollywood,
California, he was shunned by high school classmates
because they believed he was part of the Italian Mafia, and
his emerging asthma became the excuse for his family to
move back home to the South Bronx. The next year,
Zimbardo was voted the most popular boy in the senior
class at James Monroe High School. His classmate Stanley
Milgram believed that it was attributable to a situation
change, not a disposition change. Trying to understand the
links between situational experiences, physiological reac-
tions, and behavioral outcomes from that social-rejection-
induced asthma, Zimbardo early on became interested in
the mind body connection, placebo effects, and cognitive
control of motivation.
Growing up in ethnically and racially mixed environ-
ments led Zimbardo to study the intergroup dynamics be-
tween people of color already living in the Bronx and
newly arriving Puerto Ricansand resulted in his first
publication, in 1953, as a junior at Brooklyn College (Zim-
bardo, 1953). Earlier, his enthusiasm for psychology hav-
ing been dimmed by his boring introductory psychology
course (in which he earned his only C grade ever), he had
switched his major to sociology/anthropology. In his senior
year, he added a psychology major following his delight in
doing research in an experimental psychology course that
he had taken as a favor to a buddy who needed a research
partner.
Zimbardo almost did not get into his first-choice grad-
uate school, Yale University, because there was a split vote
in the psychology department between those who believed
he was black and thus likely to fail under the demands of
their program and those who felt they should take one this
once. Their judgment was based on a variety of circum-
stantial evidence that in retrospect seems convincing, but
JulyAugust 2012 American Psychologist
the delayed choice meant that he was the only candidate
available when Gordon Bower turned down their offer to
him (to get an MA elsewhere). Despite his avowed interest
in continuing to study race relations, the only research
associate position available was as a rat runner working on
exploratory behavior under K. C. Montgomery. Zimbardo
published a number of articles on their research following
his mentors untimely death and even was senior author of
an original research article with Neal Miller (Zimbardo &
Miller, 1958) and of a Science article on rat sexual behavior
(Zimbardo & Barry, 1958) during his grad student days.
At Yale, he worked with, and published with, as many
different faculty as he could; his most significant mentor
was Carl Hovland, who inspired him to work on issues of
persuasion. Zimbardo was also much influenced by the
intellectual intensity of Gordon Bower, his eventual house-
mate. The breadth of those experiences increased Zimbar-
dos psychological curiosity until it was virtually bound-
less, as is evidenced by the more than 40 diverse areas in
which he has since published.
His passion for teaching was also sparked back in
1958 when he taught his first introductory psychology
course at Yale, which eventually led to teaching classes of
more than a thousand students at a time during his 40 years
at Stanford University. Zimbardo is most proud of the
teaching he did in creating the PBS television series Dis-
covering Psychology, which has been seen by more than a
million viewers in colleges, high schools, and among the
general public globally. He has complemented his research
career with extensive textbook writing, notably authoring
Psychology and Life (Zimbardo & Ruch, 1975) and Psy-
chology: Core Concepts (Zimbardo, Johnson, & McCann,
2012).
Zimbardo has always been at the forefront of making
psychology accessible and inviting to the general public, as
well as to national decision makers, through his popular
trade books and many media appearances, as well as with
his groundbreaking research, such as the Stanford Prison
Experiment.
Since retiring officially in 2008, Zimbardo is perhaps
busier than ever, working simultaneously on many fronts,
most notably as founder and president of the Heroic Imag-
ination Project (http://heroicimagination.org/), created to
inspire and teach people of all ages how to be everyday
heroes.
Selected Bibliography
Zimbardo, P. G. (1953). The dynamics of prejudice and assimilation
among two underprivileged minority groups in New York City. Alpha
Kappa Delta, 24(1), 16 22.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The cognitive control of motivation. Glenview,
IL: Scott, Foresman.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and
order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D.
Levine (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 17, pp. 237
307). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1977). Shyness: What it is, what to do about it. Reading,
MA: Addison Wesley. [Reprinted in 1991]
Zimbardo, P. G. (1999). Discontinuity theory: Cognitive and social
searches for rationality and normalitymay lead to madness. Advances
in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 345 486.
357
 Zimbardo, P. G. (2004). Does psychology make a significant difference in
our lives? American Psychologist, 59, 339 351. doi:10.1037/0003-
066X.59.5.339
Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good
people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House.
Zimbardo, P. G., & Barry, H. (1958, January 10). Effects of caffeine and
chlorpromazine on the sexual behavior of male rats. Science, 127,
84 85. doi:10.1126/science.127.3289.84
Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (2008). The time paradox: Understanding and
using the revolutionary new science of time. New York, NY: Free Press.
Zimbardo, P. G., Cohen, A. R., Weisenberg, M., Dworkin, L., & Fire-
stone, I. (1966, January 14). Control of pain motivation by cognitive
dissonance. Science, 151, 217219.
Zimbardo, P. G., & Duncan, N. (2012). The demise of guys: Why boys are
struggling, and what we can do about it. New York, NY: TED Books.
Zimbardo, P. G., Ebbesen, E. B., & Maslach, C. (1977). Influencing
attitudes and changing behavior (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison
Wesley.
Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973, April 8).
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
The mind is a formidable jailer: A Pirandellian prison. The New York
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
Times Magazine, Section 6, pp. 38 ff.
358
Zimbardo, P. G, Johnson, R. L., & McCann, V. (2012). Psychology: Core
concepts (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Zimbardo, P. G., & Leippe, M. (1991). The psychology of attitude change
and social influence. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. [Also hardcover by
Temple University Press, 1991]
Zimbardo, P. G., & Miller, N. E. (1958). Facilitation of exploration by
hunger in rats. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology,
51, 43 46. doi:10.1037/h0048820
Zimbardo, P. G., & Radl, S. L. (1981). The shy child. New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill.
Zimbardo, P. G., & Ruch, F. L. (1975). Psychology and life (9th ed.).
Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. [19th ed., 2011, Gerrig, R., & Zim-
bardo, P. G., Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon]
Zimbardo, P. G., Sword, R., & Sword, R. (2012). The time cure: Over-
coming PTSD with the new psychology of time perspective therapy. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an Imprint of Wiley.
Zimbardo, P. G. (Co-writer, chief academic advisor, host), & WGBH-TV
with the American Psychological Association (Producers). (1990). Dis-
covering psychology [26-program video series.] Washington, DC: An-
nenberg Foundation and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. [Updated
ed., 2001]
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